


Footprints in Time

by Sholio



Category: Agent Carter (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Nostalgia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-01
Updated: 2018-06-01
Packaged: 2019-05-17 00:14:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14821595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Peggy's will leaves something for her great-niece.





	Footprints in Time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Willibald](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Willibald/gifts).



Great-Aunt Peggy's office had deep, thick carpet, and lots of interesting things to hide behind (plants, filing cabinets, tables with pieces of boring grown-up art on them), perfect for games of secret agents and cops-and-robbers and dragonslayers. Looking back on it, that was mostly what Sharon remembered: a view of her aunt's office from floor level.

Sharon was always the slayer, never the dragon; always the cop, never the thief. Even then, she knew exactly what she wanted to be.

And Aunt Peggy was endlessly patient with her -- with all the agents' children, though not all of them had the run of her office. There was a daycare in every SHIELD office facility, something that Sharon only gradually realized as an adult had quietly, at some point, disappeared. Perhaps they'd been a casualty of increased security after the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11 (she was barely old enough to remember the former; the latter had sunk into her teenage experience and become an indelible part of the world she knew). Perhaps they simply hadn't fit with Director Fury's vision of the place, when he took over after Aunt Peggy's long-delayed retirement.

There were agents around who had been with SHIELD long enough to remember what it was like under Peggy, probably better (Sharon thought) than she herself did, since she hadn't officially joined the agency until she was an adult, long after Director Fury had left his stamp firmly planted on it. But there weren't many who had seen it as she had. Aunt Peggy had taken her everywhere, with a casual disregard for protocols or security that must have baffled and infuriated some of her agents. With the little blonde girl tucked in one arm, or with a pudgy hand planted firmly in her own, she'd gone briskly about her business, taking Sharon into labs and down the stairs to file rooms, doing paperwork in dusty basements while Sharon played under the table.

It wasn't until Sharon was grown that she began to realize her aunt might have meant Sharon to take over as her successor. Peggy's own children, long grown, had no interest in the spy trade; neither did Sharon's parents. If that was, indeed, what her aunt had intended, then she had waited too long, or Sharon didn't grew up fast enough. By the time Sharon graduated with a degree in criminal justice and started her training as an agent, the brisk, sharp, dynamic great-aunt she remembered was a shadow of her former self, crippled by dementia in a way that her body's age-related physical infirmities had never managed to do. It seemed to Sharon that Peggy had somehow managed to keep herself ageless -- even in her seventies, she'd looked and acted fifty -- and then age caught up with her all at once. Sharon's biggest regret in life was that she'd never really gotten to consult properly with her aunt on a case, one agent to another. By the time she was working her own cases, Aunt Peggy was lucid only rarely: knife-sharp on good days, but the rest of the time, lost in her own head. Talking to her about classified subjects was simply no longer possible.

And now Aunt Peggy was gone. But a 98-year life, most of it spent in the spy business, left a lot of things behind.

 

***

 

The address was a warehouse in Milwaukee. From the outside it looked deserted, sprayed with graffiti, the windows boarded up. Sharon parked her rental car behind a dumpster where it wouldn't be immediately visible, and walked carefully around the building, looking at it.

The padlock opened easily to the key Aunt Peggy had left her. Sharon walked around inside, looking at things, touching nothing, until she found the little office (abandoned, like the rest of it), and a photo on the wall that she recognized. Most people wouldn't have. It was a very old picture of Aunt Peggy's father, stiff and proper in a WWI uniform. Sharon lifted it, found the lever to open the hidden door, and a stairwell yawned below her. The lights came on beneath, so the electricity was still on. That hadn't been the case at every place she'd visited.

There once had been SHIELD storage facilities like this one all over the world, all classified, most of them hidden, some secret even from the governments of the countries where they were located. Seventy years of investigating the unusual and arcane left a lot of clutter. Much of it was paperwork and evidence for cases long relinquished to the dust of history. Some of it was more interesting: things SHIELD had found, invented, confiscated, or even stolen, and then halfway forgotten about, relegating them to a basement in Madrid or a bunker in a cornfield in Kansas.

The declassification of SHIELD documents and subsequent cleanup had exposed most of these evidence depots to the light of day, figuratively and literally. A lot of their contents had been destroyed, in part for lack of manpower to deal with it. Some of them had been looted, and _those_ were the kind of incidents that kept agents of the rebuilt SHIELD up late at night, thinking about some of the things that had been in those looted facilities. Some of those old files and objects had been re-catalogued and stored in newer, more secure bunkers with better lighting. Some had been turned over to the government.

But there were still a few places like this, as yet untouched by SHIELD's cleanup efforts, full of who knew what, from the war or even earlier. Sharon's footsteps echoed as she descended, and she began to wish she'd brought a jacket. Neither heating nor cooling was necessary this far under the ground; the temperature stayed a steady mid-50s year-round. She had her gun out, just in case, even though she suspected the worst thing she'd have to deal with down here would be mice or weather damage. One of the old bunkers had been flooded at some point in the not-too-distant past, and that one she'd simply sealed up; whatever had once been in there, it was nothing but moldy and waterlogged trash now.

This one looked dry, at least. It was the fourth one she'd managed to locate after opening the safe deposit box in London that had been left to her in her aunt's will. There was no particular reason she'd been able to figure out why some of SHIELD's little evidence depots had been kept off the books and others hadn't; no reason, she thought, except some paranoid corner of her aunt's mind thought they _should_ be. And why Aunt Peggy decide to entrust them to her, she wasn't sure either -- though for all she knew, she wasn't the only one who had been sent on a little scavenger hunt. It wouldn't surprise her to find out that Fury was doing likewise, perhaps with a much more dangerous set of items to find.

There wasn't a whole lot to see down here, either. She holstered her gun after walking back and forth down dusty aisles full of shelves and boxes, all crammed into a small concrete vault that might have been an old air-raid bunker or maybe even a bricked-up part of the sewer system.

It looked like it was going to be all right to turn this one over to Director Coulson. She'd been checking them out on her own first, making sure there was nothing obvious that Aunt Peggy might have been trying to keep out of the hands of her own organization, and then letting SHIELD know that she'd found another one. By this point they had certainly figured out that she wasn't just stumbling onto these; she obviously had her own source of information. But Coulson hadn't asked. Like the former Director Fury, and Aunt Peggy before them, he was an old hand at knowing when it was best to leave a source alone, lest it dry up if someone tried to trace and tap the wellspring it came from.

As she'd done before, Sharon paused frequently to read the dates and notes on the boxes, her chest aching when she recognized her aunt's clear, precise handwriting among the unfamiliar writing of other people long dead. This was one of the _old_ storage facilities; all the ones she'd managed to ferret out from the contents of the safe deposit box had been. Some of the stuff in here probably dated back to the old SSR.

A scavenger hunt, indeed.

Very unusually for Peggy, the contents of the safe deposit box had been a disorganized mess. It had looked to Sharon, when she'd opened the box, like her aunt had simply cleaned out a desk drawer into it. Maybe that was exactly what she'd done, on her way out the door at SHIELD, or even later, at home, when dementia began creeping up on her and she could no longer remember exactly _why_ these things were important, only that they were.

Still, it gave Sharon something to do in her free time, a private case to work on, with no high stakes, simply one last opportunity to have a quiet conversation with her aunt across the gulf of time that separated them.

She ran her fingers over the yellowed and flaking label on a box. The date, in her aunt's crisp writing, was early in 1946. Back when the SSR was in New York, Sharon thought. This box had come here from there, at some point in the last seventy years.

There was no indication of what might be in it. Curious, she brushed away some of the thick layer of dust and spider webs covering the top of the box, and lifted the lid.

Old newspapers had been placed over the top to protect whatever was underneath. Sharon lifted them out; with their 1940s dates, even those might be interesting, and they were certainly fragile. Underneath, her investigating fingertips brushed something that felt like leather. She carefully unfolded it and shook it out.

It _was_ leather: a jacket. As Sharon shook out the creases that might not have been unfolded in seventy years, she realized that she'd seen this jacket before -- in old photos of her aunt in the field during WWII.

The thought had never even occurred to her to wonder what had happened to it. It was so long ago that she had just assumed it was gone. But Aunt Peggy had never thrown out anything useful.

It looked like it was still in good shape, allowing for some mustiness from its long storage. Sharon shook it again to make sure there were no spiders hitching a ride in the lining, and put it on over her blazer.

It fit surprisingly well. For the first time she realized that she was roughly of a size with her aunt -- something she never _had_ realized before, because she remembered Aunt Peggy mainly as an adult towering over her child-sized self ... and then when Sharon had next seen her, their positions had been reversed, Aunt Peggy shrunken with age, her body light and fragile when Sharon helped her out of bed.

But they had been about the same size, after all. She tweaked the jacket into place, settling it about her shoulders. The inner lining crinkled slightly with age. Or -- no -- there was something in the pocket.

Sharon put her hand in, and withdrew a folded and yellowed bit of paper, so old it was falling apart at the creases. The handwriting inside was all but illegible with age. She frowned at it, and then smiled when she realized it was nothing but a shopping list, probably from sometime after the war based on its contents.

_Vinegar_   
_2 pair nylons_   
_1 pkg hairpins_   
_Scouring powder_

... and a few more items, everyday for the 1940s, with a slight hint of the exotic through modern eyes.

Ghostly fingers tickled her spine at the thought of her aunt wearing this jacket, going out shopping somewhere (London? New York?) on some chilly day, probably the fall or winter after the end of the war. She thought of Aunt Peggy, younger than she was now, folding up the jacket and all its attendant memories, and tucking it away into a box, as she might have tucked away the war itself to move on with her life.

The rest of the box's contents were utterly prosaic, folders of receipts, mostly. But there was a story in these too, Sharon thought, flipping one of the folders open and looking at tickets for automat meals and New York department stores from a previous century. Mostly they were lunch tickets or a scribbled list of orders. Aunt Peggy buying lunch for the office? She wasn't really sure.

She laid the shopping list among them, and for the first time it occurred to her that the safe deposit box really _was_ an inheritance, a bequest, and not merely one last request from her aunt to tidy up a lingering loose end.

There were pieces of her aunt's old life here, a thousand half-frayed strands, a million tiny things so ordinary that they would have given cause for no thought at all back in the 1940s ... but separated now by seventy years, the everyday details of the past took on a new significance.

Maybe she wouldn't turn this one over to SHIELD right away. She thought she might keep it to herself for awhile, come back and look through the boxes, sort and catalogue whenever she had some spare time. She couldn't sit and share a cup of tea with her aunt, to her everlasting regret, but maybe this was something not too different from it: a chance to feel close, for just a little while, to the woman her aunt used to be. A quiet chat across time, from two different ends of a century.

Maybe there were other treasures like the jacket still to be discovered. Maybe it was just nice to spend a little time in the closest she was going to get to her aunt's company, in between saving the world. Aunt Peggy, she thought, would have liked that.


End file.
